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  • The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere
  • Bruce Burgett (bio)
The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 310 pp.

For several decades now, scholarship focused on the U.S. early republic has been bedeviled by the L-word. Liberalism has served as a central problematic and, often, as the central antagonist in and across a wide array of books and articles, ranging from the republican synthesis historiography inspired by the publication of J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment in 1975 to the public sphere debates that followed in the wake of the English translation of Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. In all cases, the consensus historiography of an earlier generation was under fire. Despite heated arguments about the place of race, gender, sex, and class in the diverse historical conjunctures of the late eighteenth century, nearly everyone agreed that the liberal origins of the U.S. republic could no longer be taken for granted. Descriptive reconstructions of the republican vocabularies of virtue, corruption, and publicness boomed in the fields of cultural, political, and social history, while literary and political theorists of various stripes critiqued the normative implications of liberalism for a rethinking of democracy in the late twentieth century. With the collapse of global communism in 1989 and the widely contested rise of neoliberalism over the two ensuing decades, this emphasis on the importance of understanding the historical genesis and limitations of liberalism has continued to shape many of the questions central to politically engaged scholarship today. How can we best think about the rise in the late eighteenth century of politically ascriptive categories such as race and gender alongside the deployment of the enlightenment universalisms that liberalism claims as its historical genealogy?What is the relation between these forms of ascription and the development of ideologies and structures of privacy and private property? What is the status of the liberal nation-state in the world system of the period?

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon's The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Public Sphere takes this now well-established set of debates as its critical terrain. In six long and cogently argued chapters that span the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Dillon dwells on the [End Page 391] shifting significance of privacy as its referent morphed from the (narrowly distributed) ability to hold property and head a household to the (presumably universal) capacity to act as a subject motivated by interiorized desires and drives. Across all of these deployments of privacy, Dillon suggests that liberalism gained its force not by excluding non-property-holding and non-household-heading subjects from political power but by including all subjects within complex structures of political and social inequality. As indicated by her subtitle, Dillon locates this revised understanding of liberalism within the debates inspired by Habermas's historical reconstruction of the rise of the eighteenth-century bourgeois "literary public sphere" as a site of critical contestation concerning the structure of state power, the economic relations of the marketplace, and the intimate relations of the household. Taking the history of gender as her primary index of inequality, Dillon argues in her first two chapters against two commonplace dismissals of Habermas: that he simply defends the normative claims of enlightenment rationality in the face of its many historical failures and that he locates the intimate sphere of the family as the unproblematic origin of the public-oriented subjectivity that engages in rational-critical debate. Instead, Dillon's Habermas is deeply aware of the ways in which the literary and political public spheres of the eighteenth century linked rational-critical debate to the (re)production of public-oriented privacies and subjectivities.

This more sympathetic (and accurate) reading of Habermas leads to the two major insights that guide the remainder of Dillon's study. First, liberal discourses of publicity and privacy create what Dillon refers to as a "recursive loop," one in which "the intimate sphere 'prequalifies' certain subjects for participation in the political public sphere, and in which the public sphere in turn produces the very...

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